Lord Phillips of Sudbury
Main Page: Lord Phillips of Sudbury (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)
Lord Phillips of Sudbury
My Lords, I have a sober view of where we now stand as a nation and, in my two minutes, I intend to concentrate on the relationship between business and local communities. I do that from a comparative basis. I am lucky enough still to live in the small town that I was bred in—Sudbury in Suffolk—and the contrast between my first 20 or 25 years and now could not be more stark in terms of business engagement with civic and public life. I do not think that the town is any different from any other in the country.
In my youth, there was strong community cohesion. Most businesses—professional businesses, factories and shops—were locally owned, and there was a happy elision between self-interest and public interest in that, if you did nothing by way of public service, people would notice. They would say, “That miserable so and so, Phillips. He sits in his office coining the money and does”—I must not use the Saxon expression—“very little”.
Today, it is tragically noticeable how few lawyers, doctors, accountants, factory owners, shopkeepers and bank managers—we do not even have those—engage with the community. The disconnect between business and civic life is astonishing and is, I think, at the root of so much that is damaging in our public and national life. It is not because people are bad; it is because of the values by which this society of ours is currently driven. Commercialisation and individualisation have done grave damage to the contribution that business people of all types should and could make, to their great advantage. One irony is that public service has huge come-back and rewards. It brings status, self-satisfaction and so on.
There is no point in pretending that we, here in Parliament, can deal with these matters. We can add a bit of help and a bit of a push but, by and large, this is a deep cultural problem for all of us—individually, collectively and communally. I just want to make that point because, unless we have a reformation and we reconnect, remoralise and re-relate business, I think that our next 20 years could be the worst of the past 200.